Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
(2016) 29:394–403
DOI 10.1007/s12129-016-9600-x
EQUALITY OF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY AT FIFTY:
COLEMAN’S REPORT AND HIS LEGACY
Russell K. Nieli
Coleman Report begins the period when sophisticated policy analysis, carried out
by social scientists trained in the gathering and interpretation of quantitative data,
begins to edge out in public influence works by sociologists and public intellectuals
less tethered to databases and sophisticated survey research methodologies.
Coleman’s study would set the pattern for future influence by prominent policy
analysts, including Christopher Jencks, Charles Murray, William Julius Wilson,
Eric Hanushek, and many more.
EEO, and the conclusions many drew from it, also represents one of four
broad phases in James Coleman’s evolving thought on education in America.
Some of the conclusions he and others culled from his EEO data, particularly the
idea of enhancing black education by busing white children to black schools,
would be greatly modified or abandoned in the light of Coleman’s future
research and experience. As the University of Chicago Chronicle put it in his
obituary: “Coleman never shied away from controversy. He was also known for
having the courage to change his stance on issues in light of new data.”3 A look
at each of Coleman’s four broad phases, spanning almost thirty years, follows.
3
“Obituary: James Coleman, Sociology,” University of Chicago Chronicle, March 30, 1995, http://
chronicle.uchicago.edu/950330/coleman.shtml.
4
James S. Coleman, The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education (New
York: Free Press of Glencoe, Illinois/Crowell-Collier Publishing Co., 1961; New York: Praeger, 1981).
396 Nieli
book today doesn’t suggest that Coleman discovered much about the values and
atmosphere of the typical American high school that wasn’t already known to the
general public, but that would be an anachronistic projection. Until World War I
most public school children left school after eighth grade, usually to begin work.
Only a small minority went on to high school, and high school attendance only
became a mass phenomenon in America in the 1920s and 1930s. Until that time, the
general image of the American public school was formed by the ubiquitous
elementary school, despite the vast difference in the internal values and attitudes
that began to distinguish primary from secondary education in America.
The Adolescent Society brought home like no previous work how a new type
of “adolescent society” had developed in America, one centered around the
public high school, and one whose values in many ways were independent of,
and often antagonistic to, the values educators and school administrators sought
to impart to students. Whereas the major culture-forming influences of the
elementary school were largely those of teachers and school principals, those
of the high school, Coleman discovered, were largely those of teenage peer
groups within these schools. And these influences often took an anti-academic
cast whereby academic values were clearly subordinate to the values of
popularity, sports, social life, and teenage sex appeal.
Coleman found that outstanding students occupied a lowly place within the
school status-hierarchy studied, while football stars, pretty women, and the
socially most popular kids held the highest rank. The dominant values of the
teenage peer culture were thus at odds with the aims of the school’s educators, a
particularly troubling situation given the desire for peer acceptance and the
power of social conformity pervading high school culture. While the situation
was not as dire as more contemporary accounts of the “acting white”
phenomenon in certain all-black schools, Coleman and many who read
his study were alarmed at the situation described. It wasn’t clear,
however, what could be done, since “the adolescent society” had taken
on a life and independence that seemed impervious to the values and
admonitions of the surrounding adult world. The American high school,
Coleman reported, had become a largely self-contained and insular
sociological unit. Coleman’s findings challenged conventional wisdom
and identified a problem, but it was not clear what, if anything, to do
to address it.
Coleman subsequently proposed school-versus-school academic competition
to enhance the status of high school intellects, in the manner that athletic
competition between schools enhanced the status of football stars, but he later
acknowledged the idea as quixotic. The brains in high school just had to accept
Challenging Conventional Wisdom: Four Moments in the Research Career of James S. Coleman 397
their status as greatly subordinate to that of the football stars and pretty
cheerleaders.
school students in the rural South still attended largely all-black schools with more
students per classroom than their white counterparts—thirty-three per classroom for
blacks versus twenty-six for whites—this difference was not enormous. On other
important measures, too, there was very little difference. In some cases, such as the
newness of the school building, the statistics favored rural Southern blacks. (This
was no doubt due to the concerted effort of many Southern states, beginning in the
1940s, to avoid threatening litigation under the “separate but equal” doctrine by
funding black education much more generously.)
Regarding how much students learned as measured by their grades on
standardized tests, the most important factor by far the Coleman researchers
found was the quality of the students in the school: their individual family
background (socioeconomic, educational, racial) and the background of their
classmates’ families. “Thus the large part of school-to-school variation in
achievement appears to be not a consequence of effects of school variations at
all, but of variations in family backgrounds of the entering student bodies,” the
report noted (296). “The school appears unable to exert independent influences
to make achievement levels less dependent on the child’s background—and this
is true within each ethnic group, just as it is between groups” (297).
The pattern of ethno-racial group achievement that the Coleman researchers
found has become all too familiar to us today: of the six ethno-racial groups studied,
whites and Asians (“Orientals”) were far ahead of the other four groups on most
measures of academic performance, with blacks usually occupying the bottom
position. And the usual remedies proffered for improving the performance of lower
performing students—smaller classes, higher teacher salaries, better curriculums,
etc.—provided little hope for improvement. Improving the academic achievement
of black and other minority students seemed a hopeless goal, at least under the
American school system as it then currently operated. “[E]quality of educational
opportunity through the schools must imply a strong effect of schools that is
independent of the child’s immediate social environment,” the Coleman team
wrote, but such a strong independent effect “is not present in American schools”
(325). The “inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and
peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they
confront adult life at the end of school” (325).
While it is possible for pessimists to read the report as concluding that nothing
will ever work, the Coleman team did show that minority children, especially
Challenging Conventional Wisdom: Four Moments in the Research Career of James S. Coleman 399
5
James S. Coleman, Sara D. King, and John A. Moore, Trends in School Segregation, 1968–73 (Washington,
DC: Urban Institute, 1975), http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED117252.
6
To the great credit of that organization, Coleman in 1991 was elected president of the American Sociological
Association in appreciation of his lifetime work in the sociology of education.
400 Nieli
Catholic schools were not more racially segregated than the public schools. In
Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities (1987), Coleman
and his research assistant Thomas Hoffer explained why the Catholic
schools—and other private schools with similar features—were so much more
effective than the public schools in teaching kids from lower-achieving racial
and ethnic minority groups.8
Although this was not mentioned by Coleman and Hoffer, the Catholic
schools had long experience with hard-to-educate children from troubled
neighborhoods and homes, having extensively dealt with the challenge of
educating the “Wild Irish” during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries—the “problem minority” of an earlier era.9 The “Catholic school
model” evolved largely as a creative adaptation to this earlier challenge, and
much of what was learned applied with minor changes to the challenge of
educating lower-class blacks and Hispanics in more recent times.
The secret of Catholic school success was explained by Coleman and Hoffer
as a result of the school’s being embedded in a fairly homogenous community,
with its various community members, including parents, teachers, students, and
principals, all committed to the stated goals, values, and teaching style of the
school. This enabled the school to attain a general coherence, along with
superior student discipline, high level of student involvement, and agreed-upon
sense of mission that was often lacking in the public schools. Coleman and Hoffer
offer this pithy summation of the dilemma of the public schools:
Conclusion
Quoted in “Obituary.”
12